‘Everyone is in pieces’: Witnesses to Israeli strike on Gaza shelter say there’s nowhere safe to go
WARNING: This story contains details about people being killed or hurt in an airstrike in Gaza and graphic images showing blood and injuries.
Mahmoud Nijim was jolted awake by the sounds of bombs falling nearby early Thursday, as the Israeli military attacked the site of a UN-run school in central Gaza that was serving as a shelter for displaced Palestinians.
“We came running to the school and we found children martyred,” Nijim, who lives nearby, told CBC News freelance journalist Mohamed El Saife. “All of the martyrs were women and children.”
“Everyone is in pieces,” he said. “Blood is everywhere on the rubble.”
He said this was yet another place where people sought safety after fleeing the Israeli strikes that have levelled much of Gaza, only to face more destruction.
“People don’t know where to go,” he said. “There isn’t a single safe place in Gaza.”
The UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) ran the school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, which was sheltering 6,000 displaced people at the time of the strikes, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said.
Israel carried out what it described as a targeted airstrike on Hamas fighters who had sheltered inside the site, with a top official saying at least 35 people had been killed. Health officials in Gaza said Israel’s strike killed at least 40 people.
Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson Lt.-Col. Peter Lerner said the military is “very confident in the intelligence” that the site was being used as an operational base for militants.
He said 20 to 30 fighters were located in the compound, and many of them had been killed, but had no precise details as intelligence assessments were being carried out.
“I’m not aware of any civilian casualties and I’d be very, very cautious of accepting anything that Hamas puts out,” he said, referring to the Palestinian militant group that runs Gaza and led the deadly militant attacks on Oct. 7 that precipitated the devastating conflict.
UNRWA’s Lazzarini said the accusation that armed groups may have been based at the site “are shocking” and against International Humanitarian Law. In a post on social media platform X, he said that the agency is “unable to verify” the Israeli claims and condemned the attack on a facility sheltering so many people.
Hospital struggles to treat injured
The early morning explosion ripped through parts of the school building, tearing holes through the walls and ceilings and showering concrete chunks on the rooms where people slept.
Footage captured by El Saife showed foam mattresses that appear still wet with blood piled up among the rubble and scattered belongings.
Sitting outside the complex Thursday, Umm Alaa Abu Daher said she woke up to the explosion and thought her son had been killed.
“I picked him up and thought he was martyred,” she said. He was alive but injured.
“I started running outside and found everyone [was] injured and martyred,” she said.
Many of the dead and injured were taken to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the city of Deir al-Balah, about five kilometres away, where patients — including children — were treated on the floor of the overcrowded facility.
A hospital spokesperson told Reuters that 14 children and nine women were among 40 dead brought to the hospital overnight, with a further 74 wounded, including 23 children and 18 women.
Dr. Ashraf Al-Attar, an emergency room doctor, told El Saife the hospital is already struggling with overcrowding and is lacking resources and equipment resulting in surgeries having to be put on hold.
“[It] made it difficult to deal with the injuries we received last night, injuries I’ve never seen before,” he said.
Displaced then displaced again
In the light of day on Thursday, Abu Daher was among those still at the site as people were clearing the debris of the building they’ll continue to shelter in.
More than 1.7 million of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have been displaced in the eight-month-long war.
At least 370,000 housing units in Gaza have been damaged, including 79,000 that were destroyed completely, according to a recent report by the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia
In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee Rafah, previously one of the only refuges for evacuees, as Israeli forces began an assault in the southern Gaza city — despite an emergency order from the International Court of Justice to halt the invasion.
But this is the third time in the past two weeks sites where dozens of civilians have been killed where they are taking shelter.
Israel faced international condemnation after a May 27 strike that set off a deadly fire in a tent encampment in the southern city of Rafah, killing 45 people.
The Israeli government vowed to investigate.
But Israel denied it attacked a second tent encampment the following day, near Rafah, where a further 21 people were killed.
As It Happens6:37Utter chaos’ at one of Gaza’s last standing hospitals, says nurse
An Israeli airstrike at a UN-run school in central Gaza has killed more than a dozen people. Israel says it was targeting Hamas fighters, but locals say it was just one of several strikes in the area this week. Karin Huster, a Doctors Without Borders nurse at Al Aqsa hospital, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal that badly injured patients are lying on the floor, people are screaming for help, and bodies arriving by ambulance are being lined up in the courtyard as loved ones say their final prayers.
Calls for transparency, independent investigation
The European Union’s head of foreign policy has called for an independent investigation of Thursday’s attack.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the Biden administration has been in contact with the Israeli government and expects it to be fully transparent making information about the strike public.
At the UN, Stéphane Djurric, the spokesperson for Secretary General António Gutteres, said the attack was another horrific example of the price that civilians are paying.”
When asked if the IDF had committed a war crime, Djurric said “there will need to be accountability for everything that has happened in Gaza” since the war began immediately following the Oct. 7 attacks.
Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people during the attacks, according to Israel, with more than 5,000 others injured. Militants took some 250 hostages back to Gaza. There are about 130 hostages remaining in Gaza. About 85 are believed to still be alive, alongside the remains of 43 others.
Israel’s subsequent bombardments and assault on Gaza has killed more than 36,500 Palestinians in nearly eight months, according to Gaza health officials, with a further 83,000 injured.
As reports of a renewed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas circulate, Palestinians in Gaza are skeptical anything will come of it as they deal with the aftermath of another attack in Rafah.
Published at Fri, 26 Jan 2024 09:01:20 +0000
Putin’s threat to put long-range weapons closer to West leaves unanswered questions
Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly conveyed Moscow’s anger over Ukraine getting approval from some NATO allies to use Western weapons more freely to defend its borders and even to attack selected targets inside Russia.
Yet analysts say that doesn’t mean the Russian state will follow through on a threat to potentially arm other nations or actors in a parallel manner, as Putin intimated is a possibility during a rare conversation with international journalists this week.
“The Russians are in a very foul frame of mind and it may distort their judgment in lots of dangerous ways, but frankly it’s hard for me to imagine more awful things that they could be doing than what they’re already doing, day in and day out, to their alleged kinsmen in Ukraine,” said Stephen Sestanovich, who served as the U.S. ambassador at large to the former Soviet Union from 1997 to 2001, via email.
The U.S. has lifted restrictions on Ukraine’s use of its weapons to hit targets within Russia itself after Russia advanced toward Kharkiv by staging attacks from its territory with impunity.
Russia has long objected to the Western weapons that have flowed to Ukraine over the course of the all-out war, now in its third year.
But some of Kyiv’s allies have grown more willing to support seeing these weapons wielded beyond the border amid a recent Russian offensive on Ukraine’s Kharkiv region that increased the pressure to give Kyiv a freer hand to operate.
“There is not any rational, pragmatic reason not to allow Ukraine to use those weapons against Russia in a way that is the most efficient,” Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs told CNN recently, arguing that any fears over escalation were moot, given what Russia is already doing in Ukraine.
In recent days, both Germany and the U.S. joined the list of allies who approve of Kyiv having more flexibility to use its Western-provided firepower to deal with the threats it faces from Russia — at least in defending Kharkiv, a border region home to Ukraine’s second-largest city.
Other allies have expressed more forceful views on letting Ukraine operate beyond the border.
‘We will think about it’
Amid these developments, Putin has said Russia — for reasons of retaliation — could put long-range weapons in the hands of others who could be in a position to hit Western targets.
“If they consider it possible to deliver such weapons to the combat zone to launch strikes on our territory and create problems for us, why don’t we have the right to supply weapons of the same type to some regions of the world, where they can be used to launch strikes on sensitive facilities of the countries that do it to Russia?” Putin said Wednesday, while meeting with a group of international journalists on the sidelines of an economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
“We will think about it.”
Sestanovich pointed out that Putin is not the only Russian official who has come out swinging on the weapons issue.
“The threat to supply other countries with arms that might hurt Americans is an interesting replacement for the threats of nuclear escalation that have been the usual Russian line for a while,” said Sestanovich, who was unclear what form that could take.
Sestanovich suspects that behind the scenes, Russian officials “have probably been quite astonished” by limits that Western nations have put on the weapons they sent to Ukraine.
It’s possible these officials “started to feel entitled to that restraint,” he said.
The nuclear sabre-rattling continued in St. Petersburg, however, with Putin reaffirming Russia’s willingness to use such such weapons if facing a threat to its sovereignty.
Dani Nedal, a University of Toronto assistant professor of political science, noted Putin’s “vague” comments in St. Petersburg lacked detail on where specifically such long-range weapons could be sent.
He noted that Russian contacts such as China, Iran and North Korea have missile programs in operation and don’t have need for supplies from elsewhere.
“It’s not to be taken entirely as a bluff,” said Nedal, who nonetheless believes it amounts to more of a warning from Putin, rather than a threat.
There are those who see greater menace in Putin’s words, however.
Oleg Ignatov, senior Russia analyst for the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization, sees a shift in the rhetoric from Moscow.
“Moscow used to say that it would simply destroy Western weapons if they were sent to Ukraine,” he said in an email.
“Now Putin is saying that Russia will retaliate against the Western countries themselves. This is a significant change. It shows that the war in Ukraine is on the escalation path at the moment.”
Messaging and meaning
Nedal said it would be instructive to watch Russian officials’ messaging in the days to come.
On Thursday, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for the Russian president, told a state broadcaster he believed the warning from Putin had been heard and was being studied in the West.
“They need to reckon with us and our position,” he said.
In an earlier conversation with reporters, Peskov declined to say where Moscow could send such weapons.
U.S. President Joe Biden has since provided messaging of his own on the matter on Thursday.
In an interview with ABC News, Biden underlined the fact that Washington is backing the use of these weapons for a limited purpose — to help Ukraine quash Russian attacks on Kharkiv.
“We’re not talking about giving them weapons to strike Moscow, to strike the Kremlin,” Biden said. “Just across the border where they’re receiving significant fire from conventional weapons used by the Russians to go into Ukraine to kill Ukrainians.”
Russia’s invasion of its neighbour has upended life in Ukraine for nearly 28 months, caused thousands of civilian deaths and destroyed a staggering amount of buildings and infrastructure.
But Ukraine has imposed hefty losses on Russia, with Pentagon officials stating earlier this year that Moscow had seen some 315,000 soldiers killed or wounded in the conflict.
When speaking to journalists, Putin would not state the extent of Russia’s military losses — though he claimed Ukraine’s casualties are five times that of Russia.
Published at Thu, 06 Jun 2024 22:05:29 +0000
